


Making Sense of It All

by orphan_account



Category: Fargo (2014)
Genre: Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Gore, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Past Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Past Drug Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-20
Packaged: 2018-05-21 22:33:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6060610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The worst part is that he can’t breath, and that has nothing to do with the inferno that is his neck, currently. His lung feels collapsed, and he goes to paw at his chest only to find blood. Ripped stitches, then. Well. Numbers, for the life of him, can’t remember what happened to get to this point. He doesn’t really give a shit, either, because when the pain in his side settles in (and he’s wrong, so wrong, to think that a collapsed lung and a bullet wound would hurt any less than a fucked up throat). He goes to scream, only to find that he can’t.<br/>That’s when it hits him, why the pain is there-- why there hasn’t been a single distinguishable noise coming out of his own mouth since his awakening. He ignores the pop-pop-popping of stitches and the blood coming from under his hospital shirt and the fact that he can’t breath to reach for his throat, and his eyes widen. There’s a stoma situated right under his adam's apple.<br/>He musters all of his strength, inhales as much as one good lung will allow, and screams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> First names of Numbers and Wrench are in reference to these actors in season two who I'm pretty sure depict them: [Grady/Numbers](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm5996859/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t200) [Wes/Wrench](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm7793020/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t205)

Numbers wakes up in the back seat of a particularly shitty, stagnant Ford that smelled like it was doused in oil and gasoline. Because, why the fuck not? Honestly, what in his life has occurred that this wasn’t the inevitable climax?

He’s in pain, and burning rips his neck like hot flashes. Numbers has suffered crippling burns, compound fractures, infection, and gunshot wounds, (only to name a few of the unpleasantries coupled with mob-work) and he would rather experience all of those, magnified, a hundred times over if it meant that he’d never have to feel this pain in his throat again.

The worst part is that he can’t breath, and that has nothing to do with the inferno that is his neck, currently. His lung feels collapsed, and he goes to paw at his chest only to find blood. Ripped stitches, then. Well.

Numbers, for the life of him, can’t remember what happened to get to this point. He doesn’t really give a shit, either, because when the pain in his side settles in (and he’s wrong, so wrong, to think that a collapsed lung and a bullet wound would hurt any less than a fucked up throat). He goes to scream, only to find that he can’t.

That’s when it hits him, why the pain is there-- why there hasn’t been a single distinguishable noise coming out of his own mouth since his awakening. He ignores the pop-pop-popping of stitches and the blood coming from under his hospital shirt and the fact that he can’t breath to reach for his throat, and his eyes widen. There’s a stoma* situated right under his adam's apple.

He musters all of his strength, inhales as much as one good lung will allow, and at the horn.

Wrench is there in an instant, eyes flitting over him wildly. They must be at a motel or something, because a morbidly obese man is running after him and is yelling shit like “you can’t stay here!” and “I’m going to call the cops!” after Wrench as soon as he flings the door open. Numbers doesn’t care. The pain is blinding and he is scratching at the fiery dryness that is his neck and throat.

 _Please, please,_ he wants to sign, _kill me, please._

Wrench has a wooden cigar box next to Numbers’s head on the seat and is rattling through it, pulling out vials and syringes and all sorts of illegal-looking things with the arm of his that isn’t in a sling.

Who did this to them? Numbers doesn’t remember.

There’s a barely distinguishable coldness in his right arm before he’s losing consciousness, and a sense of overwhelming familiarity that Numbers remembers from long before he worked with Wrench. He wonders where Wrench got the heroin from. He wonders if it was hard.

There’s another cold feeling and a prick, and weird tastes in his mouth, like saline and the coppery taste of B12. Lastly, the injection in his foot* that warms him up and knocks him out: it’s morphine. Jesus Christ, this all must’ve cost a fortune.

Sleep hits him like a fucking train.

* * *

 

He doesn’t wake up again, or maybe he does and Wrenchjust doesn’t remember, for a very long time. That gives him a lot of time to himself, which is something he needs but doesn’t want. Wrench starts to make the calls.

A friend of a friend owns a car lot right in Irving, which is barely an hour and a half drive from Arlington. But he opts for one in Kansas, anyways. He wants to keep illegal activity away from home as much as possible, even though finding a running Ford outside of a pub in Saint Paul is almost too opportune to be stolen property, anyways.

He wonders if he should find a drug dealer in the greater Dallas area, or just pick up a lot of shit in Nebraska and hope for the best. The former is probably what Wrench will end up doing, regardless, because Numbers is going to need a steady supply, at least for now. He only has what is left from an Oklahoma State University professor (an old goon job from before Syndicate). That is, to say, not much.

Maybe Loli’s dealer sells things besides pot. He knows that she’ll be confrontational when he asks, but he’s seen the bong she has stashed in the corner of her closet, and smelt what she hasn’t been able to cover with Febreeze and candles before he gets home. He doesn’t know why she does it-- doesn’t ask, and doesn’t care-- but he does feels uncomfortable asking her to hit up whatever scumbag she buys from to ask for class A drugs, so he waits for too long.

They run out of saline when they cross the Oklahoma panhandle, which is bad enough, because Numbers’s lips get cracked and his hands twitch feebly whenever he isn’t hooked up to the bag. Then, when they reach a place near Amarillo and Wrench finally has to get gas for the one million miles to the gallon rental he picked up, Wrench wastes half the morphine they have left by fumbling around in the dim, neon light of the gas station.

Numbers starts half-waking in the back seat of the 2005 Nissan, with too much energy from the heroine and no induced sleep from the morphine. Wrench has to put him down silently a couple of times, getting out at rest stops to check him in the back seat and render him immobile in a burrito of blankets. Each time it happens, Numbers lasts for about half an hour before wiggling his way out and reaching a clammy hand for Wrench in the front seat.

He tuckers himself out at Breckenridge, only after Wrench lets him sit up in the front, and he suddenly realizes why he’s doing this when Numbers nods off again. There, in the passenger seat, Numbers’s hair is mussed overgrown, which makes him appear childish, even though he has tattoos and a beard. Wrench is reminded that Numbers is, in fact, two years younger than him. Too young to die painfully, which is what would’ve happened if Wrench had just left him with Bemidji police.

Fargo doesn’t leave men like them alone to die. It just doesn’t happen.

Wrench texts Loli at every red light, practically begging her to answer, only to remember that it’s late on a school night.

Numbers vomits when they get to the Dallas area, and won’t stop shivering. Wrench pulls over to a Walmart parking lot and covers his trachea so the throwup comes out a suitable hole. He’s used to the procedure by now, but Numbers isn’t, so he cries because of the pain and his empty stomach and the inevitable infection he’ll have on his stab wounds. He cries things in the dark that Wrench will never hear or see, and when he’s done, he puts his hand in Wrench’s and signs, Helen Keller-style, _where are we going?_ over and over again.

Everything is too blurry, so Numbers doesn’t see him sign _my house._ about twelve times in succession. He does see Wrench’s face turn into his father’s, though, and then his brother’s, so he decides it’s all a bad dream, and he falls into a drugged-out sleep.

* * *

Loli got Cochlear implants* via a grant when she was three and Wrench was seventeen. It was one of those bouts of sobriety that his mother had, she applied for grants and scholarships for both Wrench and Loli.

And when Lana (that was his mother’s name) was good, she was _so_ good that you could almost believe that she was being honest. She would go to the AA in Dallas and apply for studios and salons that took her beautician's degrees, and try and coerce her kids into coming back to her. Every time it stuck for more than two weeks, she’d come and pick up Wrench and from the orphanage or foster home he was at, with a new dye job and her mirrored orange glasses. Lana would drive him (and eventually, when she had Lolita*, her as well) to Baskin Robins and talk about how different things were. How she was single now, or how the man she was currently with wasn’t that bad and wanted her to pursue modeling/acting/singing. She’d take him to her parent’s house in San Antonio, and he’d spend the period of time that Lana was sober in the house of his senile grandfather and ditzy alcoholic of a grandmother. He wondered, privately, sometimes, if they were still alive.

Lana always fell off the wagon, always, always, always, and go back. Go back to the drinking, or the coke, and whatever man she was with at the time (for most of Wrench’s life, that meant his father, but when his heart finally failed him at the ripe age of forty-nine, Loli’s dad started filling that position) and leave her children with her parents until Grandma Patty eventually called CPS to have Wrench taken away and Loli’s father contacted. But he didn’t blame Grandma Patty. She didn’t raise kids well. She definitely wouldn’t be able to take care of two deaf discards along with her mindless husband. She told Wrench once, when she had the rare pneumonia of someone who grew up in a place hotter than Texas, and couldn’t drink, that his mother was an alcoholic because of his grandfather, who was an abusive asshole right up until someone brained him with a tire iron and he couldn’t even take a shit by himself. His grandma told him that it was a robber, but he thinks it was probably her. That might be where he had gotten his violent tendencies and anger problems.

Regardless, Loli got the Cochlear implants that caused her so much pain for most of her childhood, and Wrench was pissed that they didn’t even accomplish the job of waking her when he knocked. So he rang the doorbell twice, and patted his jacket down to see if the keys were still not there.

She opened the door in one of his terrycloth robes, rubbing her eyes with one hand and fingering the safety of the .22 caliber handgun in her pocket with the other. She put on her glasses after a second and scowled at him.

 _I need your help getting something from the car,_ he signs once her hands are out of her pocket ready to communicate with him.

 _Fuck you,_ she signs back.

 _Can this wait until later? I need your help,_ he replies, rolling his eyes.

 _Fuck that, too. For a month: no call, no nothing. I hear you’re in a Minnesota prison, and what,_ she signs, using her fingers pointedly so “prison” has a more similar connotation to “hell”.

 _I was, and now I’m not,_ He signed, _are you going to help?_

She huffs, and pulls the robe tighter across her chest, looking past him to the rental car.

 _That looks like a rental. What’s in there, a dead body?_ She asks.

Somberly, he holds her gaze and replies with, _It could be soon, if we don’t get moving._

Her eyes widen, and she says audibly “Let me put Gert in my room. I’ll be out in a second.”

She closes the door and Wrench goes to the car, adjusting Numbers’s seat so he’s in a sitting position. He needs Loli to carry the IVs hooked up to his arm and the drugs. He doesn’t want to risk leaving anything incriminating in the vehicle, especially since neighbors in this area are so nosey that they’d probably help themselves to looking in the back seat come morning.

By the time Loli comes back, with her suede boots on and her hair done up in as tight of a bun as a black persons who wears her hair naturally can muster, Numbers is groaning from the pain, and at least two of the stitches in his deepest stab wound have popped.

She wrinkles her nose at the sight of him. _How long have you been traveling with this junkie?_

 _He’s not a junkie,_ He defends, then adds, _it was out of necessity. Take that box out from the back._

She shook her head, _No, give me his feet. He needs to stay horizontal, or else he’ll keep bleeding like that,_ she pointed to the blood staining his shirt.

Wrench nodded, happy that he asked Loli to help. She was always so good with stuff like this, _Okay, but get the box first and put it inside._

She nods, _We’ll put him in the guest room._

 _No, we’ll put him in my room,_ Wrench countered.

Loli’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline, but she didn’t add anything else before taking the wooden box in her arms and carrying it inside. He wanted to go after her and tell her it wasn’t like that, but maybe it was, at least for him, and if there was any doubt in his mind, then she’d weed it out and take it as assurance and worry herself sick.

When she was back outside, Wrench had taken Numbers’s feet out of the car and put them on the driveway gravel. He immediately started panicking and scratching at Wrench’s shoulders and neck, looking around so manically that there was no way he was lucid. Loli put her hand to his forehead before Numbers bared his teeth and batted her away.

 _He’s burning up, Wes,_ she signed, _We need to get him to a hospital._

Wrench stiffened, _That’s not an option. What else can we do?_

 _We can run a cold bath until he cools down, and then heat him up until he gets warm again,_ she signed, rubbing at the hand Numbers slapped, _But that’s going to take a while. It could be a few days._

 _Help me get him inside, and then we’ll worry about it._ He signed, putting his good arm under Numbers’s torso after his movements weakened.

She grabbed his feet and hefted them under her armpits, and when they moved him out of the car and towards the light of the open door, she saw his neck.

“Wes,” she said out loud, looking him in the face so he could read her lips, “What..?”

He knew she wouldn’t understand, but he ventured to say “Lay tur” as legibly as possible.

She didn’t ask any more questions as they carried him inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My knowledge of this program only goes as far as season one, so I undoubtedly missed things in canon. I can't bring myself to really give a shit, though.
> 
> * a stoma is a hole in the neck made as a result of a laryngectomy  
> *I watched an episode of, like, Law & Order or Fear of the Walking Dead or something that said injecting morphine between your big toe and second toe helps it circulate faster? Or maybe slower, idk, but I'm assuming Wrench, like myself, has no clear idea of what he's doing, so he follows a lot of what he read in books/saw on TV.  
> *Both Wes and his sister are deaf from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome  
> *I named his sister Lolita because I headcanon Wes being named after Wes Craven, the horror director, so their mom maybe has a soft spot for classic books and film? Idk i think the names just go together well.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Are you really awake this time, or will I have to knock you out again? she signed, all in finger spelling.  
> He shook his head and then raised his hand to weakly bat at his ear.  
> “Oh, you can hear?” she asked.  
> She had the soft, slurred tone of someone who was deaf or hard of hearing, which Numbers learned to recognize from the few curses that Wrench let out over their years of working together.  
> Wrench.

He woke, this time, to find himself naked in a large, old fashioned bathtub. He shivered for a long time before realizing that the tub was filled with ice water. He turned his head to see IV bags on the towel rack and two plastic tubes going into his arm. After he put two and two together, assuming Wrench put him in some sort of safehouse, a door opened.

A small, broad black girl with freckles walked in, and a fat tabby cat followed her. The cat jumped on to the edge of the tub and started dipping its paw into the water. Numbers weakly tried to push it off.

The girl startled when she saw movement, and then smiled brightly when she saw that Numbers was awake. She pushed the cat off the edge of the tub and sat in its place, and Numbers instinctively tried to cover himself, but his hand was too numb to move.

_ Are you really awake this time, or will I have to knock you out again?  _ she signed, all in finger spelling.

He shook his head and then raised his hand to weakly bat at his ear.

“Oh, you can hear?” she asked.

She had the soft, slurred tone of someone who was deaf or hard of hearing, which Numbers learned to recognize from the few curses that Wrench let out over their years of working together.

Wrench.

Numbers jerked his head towards the door, and then immediately regretted it, feeling the scabs around his neck crack and protest. 

“Shh, shh,” she said, putting her hand out to comfort him, but letting it hang in the air when he jerked away, “are you looking for Wes? He’s just in the shower right now. I wanted to check in on you. My name’s Lolita.”

Wes, who the hell is Wes? Why did Wrench take him here?

It all came flooding back. Bemidji, Lester, Malvo, the stabbing, the throat slitting, and Wrench driving Numbers like a goddamned ambulance to wherever the hell this is. He will never be able to go back to Fargo.

Numbers shivers, only partially because of the cold water, and sinks lower into the tub.

His stoma goes underwater and he’s gasping for air.

“Hold up, hold up,” she says, putting her arm around the back of his shoulder and letting him lean on her. The seizing in his throat wears off after a bit, but Numbers is almost gagging from the new sensation he experienced. He doesn’t even notice that Loli’s arm doesn’t recede until it wipes along his forehead.

“You’re cooler than a cucumber, dude, let’s warm you up,” she says, reaching under the bathwater.

Numbers startles and almost kicks her hand before realizing a needle is stuck in between two of his toes. He wonders, again, where Wrench got morphine from.

The water drains and Loli is polite enough not to look before he covers himself with his hands, and scoots to the side so she can re-plug the bathtub.

The water is a little too cold, but becomes tepid quickly. There’s a shout from down the hall which Numbers almost misses, but she looks past him as the water is falling over her hand, and says, “Want to see something funny?”

When the tub fills to cover up to the middle of his chest, she turns off the water and goes to the toilet beside the tub. Then, she flushes.

About two seconds later, there is an undignified screech from the same voice down the hall, and Numbers doesn’t hide his smile a bit. She grins broadly at him when she sees his reaction.

“So,” she said, taking her place back at the edge of the tub, “how are you feeling? You’ve been in and out of it for a couple of days.”

He doesn’t reply, but makes note of the fact that he’s been out for two days, at least.

She sighs, “You don’t have to reply, I guess. Do you want me to go get Wes for you?”

Numbers shook his head and waited for some circulation to return to his fingers before signing,  _ Where’s Wrench? _

She cocks her head and thinks about it for a moment, “Oh, damn, is that what you call him? Was I not supposed to tell you his name?”

He’s smug for a moment before signing,  _ Don’t worry about it. I already knew. _

She smiles. “Thank goodness.”

A thought occurs to him, and he blanches, because this girl seems nice. She seems like, at least, a polite enough person to take a strung out stranger into her house. Numbers feels jealous, and anxious for some reason, but he doesn’t want to tell her about the men he’s seen Wrench with.

Not that he’s homophobic, though. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. 

He musters up the courage to ask,  _ Are you his wife? _ before she almost falls over laughing.

_ Does our outstanding similarities not give it away?  _ she signed, still laughing like a maniac,  _ He’s my brother. _

Numbers flushes, because that makes sense. When he looks at her more closely, he sees the same nose on her face that’s on Wrench’s. They also have the same sad puppy dog eyes.

When she wipes away her tears dramatically, she leans in a little closer to stage whisper.

“I mean, not to be a tool, but I was about to ask you the same thing, like,” she circles her hands, “he’s queerer than a three dollar bill, so, are you..?”

Numbers shakes his head. He’s upset by the thought, but isn’t really sure why.

He recognizes that the uncomfortableness of the situation is really just stemming from his injuries, which are starting to throb again slightly. He hisses in through his teeth, and Lolita catches on.

“Oh, shoot, yeah, the Epsom salt is in the bathroom.” She said, standing and walking out, “um, don’t go anywhere.”

Before she goes, she turns back to talk one more look at him with an intensity that is disconcerting. She walks back to the tub and turns the little spigot on the morphine bag before he can connect the correlation in his head.

“I’m only doing a little bit, because, well, do you want to eat?” She asks.

Numbers feels a comfortable wave washing over him, then nods. She smiles back at him.

“Awesome. I made turnip soup, man, and no one wants to go anywhere near it!” She runs out the door and down some stairs.

Jesus, what has Wrench gotten him into?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a shorter chapter to just kind of introduce Lolita's role and also get Numbers's situation addressed.


End file.
